Thank you for considering the purchase of my book. Some of its main themes are as follows: Is America really a socialist country? You may be surprised by the answer of an old-fashioned liberal. I know I was. How does the free market economy of our Founding Fathers stack up against the free market economy of today? Is Obamacare really necessary? How deep is the 'health-care-crisis'? How many years have American hourly wages been stagnant: 20, 30, 40? These and a variety of other questions are addressed in a straight-forward manner in it. Some of the other questions include: What brought on the Great Recession? Was it just George W. Bush? How does Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' work? Or does it? What is 'supply-side' economic theory? Does it really work? Why is our economic recovery so slow? What are dynamic equilibrium and economic momentum - and why do we need to understand them? This book is the result of wide-ranging research through a variety of historical and contemporary sources. A small sampling includes Adam Smith, The Federalist, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alan Greenspan and the data banks of several government agencies. Finally, what you read here is documented clearly to facilitate your careful evaluation and verification. PRISONERS OF THE PRESENT TENSE And the Cult of Laissez-Faire By DEAN EKOLA AuthorHouse Copyright © 2013 Dean Ekola All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-4772-9214-3 Contents Introduction...............................................................1-12Discussion.................................................................13-200Afterword..................................................................201-204Endnotes...................................................................205-243Index......................................................................244-261 CHAPTER 1 Our Broken Compass Our current economic crisis is rooted in our failure torecognize that the foundation of our economy rests upona synthesis of public and private resources. Ultimately,this failure of perception arises out of our uniquelyAmerican predisposition to exaggerate the power andrights of the individual when viewed in the context ofsocial forces. This exaggeration naturally promotes thedelusion that our economy will perform in an adequatemanner with inadequate public resources. By the sametoken, it makes it easier for those in command of theprivate sector to divert resources away from publicinfrastructure into private hands. Given the short-termmaterial advantages that this myopic strategy bestowsupon the private sector, it is more than understandablethat private interests have consistently and strenuouslyadvocated these policies since not long after the birth ofour independent republic. Our renewed embrace of thisradical and dangerous hypothesis over the course of thepast generation has brought us, once again, to the brinkof ruin. What is more difficult to understand is that thisshell game continues to succeed even though it seriouslydamages the interests of the general public.Dean Ekola As historians sift through the record of President George W. Bush'sadministration, his handling of one event will stand out as the mostdecisive. And for those who lived through it, it will come as nosurprise that 9/11/01 is that singular event. However, as the hangoverfrom the Great Recession lingers on, the place of that infamous crimein our conventional wisdom even now is shifting away from its initialrole as a battle cry for the War on Terror. Once embraced as theoverarching issue for the American agenda and the justification forthe wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, that view of 9/11/01 is being erodedby the destructive and costly consequences of the deeply flawedstrategy of those wars. The heavy costs resulting from Bush's flawed war strategy - madeworse by his refusal to adequately finance them - contributed to oursoaring national debt and the onset of our current economic crisis.Indeed, the depth of this economic crisis, now measured in years anda daunting backlog of millions unemployed, mirrors the implacablecharacter of our decade long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But whilethe rude metrics of common sense suggest a strong linkage betweenthese two wars and our current problems, we must not fall into thetrap of mistaking a contributing, albeit significant, factor for anexclusive one. We must keep in mind that an economic crisis as deep as our currentone cannot be explained entirely by a single cause, nor by the failuresof a single administration. Hence, when we view the fiscalimprovidence of Bush 2 in the wider context of the past 50 years, wefind a wide range of macroeconomic/sociological/ perceptualproblems. All of these contributed in their own way to our currentdifficulties, and all were made worse by our growing predilection fordeficit-financed government. This predilection has led us to resort todeficits not only in bad times, as prescribed by John Maynard Keynes,but too oft